Yeah awesome idea and project there Luke... That is one thing that keeps a lot of good people inside the Flash IDE when programming - just learning about and hunting all these things down.
There are all these great tools out there, it would be so nice to just double click and have them running. Even if just for new machine installs... Great idea! Cheers, Robin -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Luke Bayes Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2007 1:59 PM To: Open Source Flash Mailing List Subject: Re: [osflash] Free AS3 compilers? Not sure if this made it through, got rejected on my other email addy. Sorry if it's a duplicate. lb. ------------------------------------ Hey Jason, There are a couple of issues that you're facing in your selection of compilers. Here is some information that may help: a) Flash CS3 Authoring: This tool is primarily available to continue supporting designers. While you *can* write ActionScript 3 that gets compiled by the 'asc' compiler, you can *not* take advantage of any code that relies on the Flex 2+ framework. This means that you will essentially be relegated to rolling your own for just about everything. This is probably appropriate if you're mostly building visual in-place marketing widgets like ads or page headers. I'm sure there are people that would disagree with me, but I will go out on a limb and say that authoring is not an appropriate tool for building real applications in ActionScript. It *is* an appropriate tool for building assets that get embedded in your applications. b) Flex Builder: If you're planning on doing any serious development, you really should purchase Flex Builder. This is an Eclipse plugin and includes the Flex SDK plus a full IDE. This is most definitely the tool that you want if you're building applications. The Flex Builder product is valuable because of it's ability to help you write MXML and ActionScript code. If you aren't comfortable or interested in using Eclipse, you don't need this tool. c) Flex SDK: The mxmlc compiler comes with the Flex SDK which is free to download and will even be fully open source (if it's not already). The SDK alone does not include any development tools. This is just a handful of compilers and the Flex framework. You should know that mxmlc does *not* compile .fla files and mxml applications cannot be compiled with Authoring. You *can* however compile visual assets with Authoring as SWFs and include those in your Flex applications. If you're interested in getting up and running quickly (and for free) with ActionScript 2, ActionScript 3 or MXML projects, you can do so using a new open source project called "Sprouts" that I created this year. http://projectsprouts.googlecode.com/ This is a Ruby application that will download and install every single thing you need including compilers, build scripts, project templates and external libraries (like AsUnit) from a single command in your terminal. It also makes working with the mxmlc command line compiler *much* more approachable. (Thanks for the mention Ogla!) Good Luck, Luke Bayes http://projectsprouts.googlecode.com _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org _______________________________________________ osflash mailing list [email protected] http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/osflash_osflash.org
